yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser [browser that you're signed into youtube on] [link to youtube video]
Not knowing that argument for yt-dlp cost me a lot show prep the other day. I needed gay porn without the porn videos - the ones with really so bad its good acting, and nothing downloads mature content on YouTube out of the box these days. Those cheapo, sketch YouTube download sites won't work with mature content. Same goes for yt-dlp. Normies, myself included, are forced to use yt-dlp with this very specific --cookies-from-browser argument if they want to download age restricted videos. Ya gotta use a YouTube account now, too. Being a computer "power user" seems to take more steps every year. How is anyone supposed to keep up with the latest erotic YouTube channel backup techniques? IDK I could prolly give you an overly verbose overview.
Also, not sure if this will get my account banned if I download too much gay porn off of YouTube, so I'll probably use a burner. You may want to, too. 2025 is weird. I don't want to be the Steve Rambo YouTube account that gets banned for downloading too much Steve Rambo.
Ok, so here's how to use yt-dlp to download raunchy stuff on Winblows (like me).
Install yt-dlp with this command (once scoop is installed)
scoop install yt-dlp
We'll use this guy
--cookies-from-browser
Sign into Youtube your browser of choice. In this example, we'll use Brave. Also, use the CD command to the directory that you would like the videos downloaded.
Fuck, what now? is --cookies-from-browser busted? Oh yeah, replace brave with firefox. Brave fucks it up because it's Chromium based (which means it can never be "based"). Sign into YouTube on Firefox and do this.
We did it reddit! We adapted to yet another YouTube policy change!
Please share this if you like it or, maybe write a your own, better, more focused tutorial that doesn't have the words gay porn all over it with muscular shrek ascii art if this isn't your thing. You do you.